Advances in wireless telecommunications are rapidly increasing the utilization of mobile devices that handle communication of media and data between users and providers. Typically, mobile devices have connected to mobile networks, such as a wireless wide area network (WWAN) over an air interface by employing a wireless connection (e.g. 2G/3G/3.5G/4G). With evolution of wireless communication, the throughput capabilities of the air interface continue to dramatically increase, leading to a capacity bottleneck at a link between the core infrastructure and the base station.
As the demand on this link has grown, additional links, such as fiber optic lines (e.g., T-1s) have been added between the base station and the core network. However, this conventional approach is very expensive to a wireless service provider. Alternately, a Digital Signal 3 (DS-3) line can added between the base station and the core network, to increase bandwidth when demand is extremely high. Generally, when more than a specified number of T-1s are required to satisfy demand, it is more cost efficient to replace them with a full DS-3, which is also a high cost to the wireless service provider. Moreover, traditional wireless network air interface capabilities provide for a single user to demand the bandwidth of multiple T-1s (e.g., 7.2 Mbps, which is approximately the bandwidth provided by six T-1s). Thus, the above conventional approach for servicing high bandwidth data demands of subscribers proves to be extremely expensive.
Further, bandwidth utilization varies based on the type of application. For example, applications, such as, e-mail or web-browsing are not as demanding as some constant-throughput demanding applications, such as, streaming video, audio, etc. As demand for multimedia applications increases, the strain to reliably transfer the content between the application server and the end user increases. Compounding this issue is the fact that the demand for this content is in real-time, so any delays in transmission are perceivable to the end user. Accordingly, bandwidth utilization in the traditional approaches is inefficient and can negatively impact performance and customer satisfaction.